I have been reading some bits on the Intel Website.  (Whoever said we never click on the Google Ad words?)  An interesting topic with two points:

1. We used to think of IBM mainframes and MIPS (Millions of instructions per second).   Then PCs came along and it was the clock speed.  This got irrelevant when Intel got the chips to do more and more in a CPU cycle.  Then came along duo chips and quad chips.  The word now is BOPS  – Billions of Operations Per Second.  So a Quad Core Intel chip Xeon E5345 can execute 153,500 BOPS, or 153,500,000,000,000 instructions per seconds.
2. This chip that executes at 153,500 BOPS consumes 335 Watts.  That’s a lot of power, but compare that with a single core Intel processor which executes at 33,115 BOPS and uses 323.4 Watts.  Yes a 4.47x improvement in instructions per Watt.  Yes global warming and power consumption are now big issues in the compuer industry. 
3. Now I see there are some CPUs with 6 cores,  are these called  Sex-Core?  At 2,700 dollars, I will have to wait a while.